Serving Clovis, Portales and the Surrounding Communities
Serving Clovis, Portales and the Surrounding Communities
Sorted by date Results 126 - 150 of 399
Special to the PNT One of the first of the pioneers to come to the Roosevelt County area was the Carter Family, who settled at Tierra Blanca Lake about 10 miles west of the present site of Portales, so named because of the “White Earth” which surrounds it. The Carters had left their holdings at Black Water, or Agua Prieta, between Salt Lake and Spring Lake, Texas in 1881 when the XIT Ranch took more than 3 million acres of land in the Texas Panhandle. Many of the squatters who were forced out migrated to Eastern New Mex...
Editor’s note: This is second of two parts of a thesis paper written in 1934 by Norvell Tate. “So far as we know, the first white man to visit the Llano Estacado was Coronado in 1541. Man had flourished for many centuries as evidence by the findings in recent excavations between Clovis and Portales. For almost 350 years this country was left to the Indians and wild animals. In the settlement of Curry County perhaps no one thing played so important a part as the windmill and the drilled well. They were adapted to this country...
I...
Anita Doberman I am trying to learn one thing as I grow older. Yes, even I attempt to grasp higher truths, and these are not tips to be a better cook or crafty mom because they are impossible tasks for my incapable hands, but notions that I really have no control over most things that happen in my life. I am a passenger, OK a backseat-driver kind of passenger, but a passenger nonetheless. On some level I know this from clear empirical data, no matter how much I plan things they always unfold in different ways, but on another...
I am trying to learn one thing as I grow older. Yes, even I attempt to grasp higher truths, and these are not tips to be a better cook or crafty mom because they are impossible tasks for my incapable hands, but notions that I really have no control over most things that happen in my life. I am a passenger, OK a backseat-driver kind of passenger, but a passenger nonetheless. On some level I know this from clear empirical data, no matter how much I plan things they always unfold in different ways, but on another level I resist...
This columnist, Don McAlavy, has two letters that Norvell G. Tate and W.H. “Bill” Duckworth wrote to each other in 1934. The first letter was from N.G. Tate of Albuquerque, June 25, 1934. “Mr. W. H. Duckworth, Clovis, New Mexico. Dear Sir; I am attempting a thesis for a master’s degree at the University of New Mexico on the subject, “A Brief History of Curry County.” A good friend of yours and of mine told me that you had an abundance of material on that subject. If you would be so kind as to lend me whatever you have along...
There has never existed a class more respectful, as a whole, to womanhood than the men of the old West. There was no half-way ground with them; a woman was either good or she was bad and a gentleman acted accordingly, said Sid Boykin. In town (Sid didn’t name the town) the old saloon served as the ballroom as well as the church. If a report of the coming affair were circulated in time, the boys came in horseback, from possibly as far as a hundred miles away, to dance most of the night, and then in the early morning to s...
“Once upon a time,” said Bill Duckworth of Clovis in 1951, “a man named August Schmidt had a saloon and the first day of June, the landlord called on him and said “Well, August, everything seems to be going up, so the first of July I am going to raise your rent. “Shortly after the landlord had gone, the water and light man came in and said, “Well, August, with everything going up we have had to raise our rates so after the first of July your water and light bill will be more. And then the gas man called to tell him that af...
Miss Orpha Appleman, a little, gray-haired lady with a shy voice, was one of Clovis’ most prolific, creative artist. She was originally from Butler County, Kan. Her father moved the present house (located at 922 Wallace) to Clovis when Clovis was first founded. We are indebted to the late Kathryn Henry for the following tribute to Miss Appleman, which was taken from an article that Kathryn wrote for the Clovis News Journal in 1947. (It was Phyllis Kilmer, who in 1978, asked us to not forget to put Miss Appleman’s story in...
“Saturday, July 5, 2008, marked another Forrest, N.M. reunion,” said Judy Sours. “I have attended several, including the first one held in 1966. The school had recently closed and the buildings were empty, no longer to be used to educate children. “Small rural communities live through the school, as did Forrest, and this was the end of a great school. The school building may be crumbling, but the spirit of Forrest lives on in the hearts of those that attended the reunion. “My memories begin in the 60s when I was an elementar...
Memoirs left by Levi J. Whiteman, grandfather of the author’s wife Kathy McAlavy brought to life a drama that was produced in Portales in 1907 by Whiteman, then 20, and his friends. The historical melodrama was written in 1888 by John A. Fraser. The melodrama was called “A Noble Outcast” and founded on an older piece, “Jocrisse the Juggler.” The author said “there is no character to be found with such power to compel alternate laughter and tears as Jerry the Tramp. The drama is intense, the appeal to the sympathy of the huma...
Illustration Courtesy Don McAlavy Reproduced from a historic newspaper clipping. This photograph made in 1897 by S.E. Moore at Portales Springs depicts the legend of the shootout between Doak Good and Gabe Henson in the 1880s at the Springs. Editor’s note: This is the first of three articles about two early settlers on the Llano Estacado, Doak Good and Jim Newman. A Washington scandal involving a U.S. Senator from Arkansas brought the first permanent resident to the High Plains of Eastern New Mexico. Doak Good, a 3...
Editor’s note: This was the first column Don McAlavy wrote for the Clovis News Journal. In 1965, Vora Hartley had purchased the old Westward Ho Motel on First Street in Clovis. She had hired friends of mine, Tom and Celine Yelverton, to manage the place. I was single back then and got talked into being the “night clerk” and living just off the office and the gallery. That was my night job, no pay, just free boarding, but I was busy during the day earning a living as a printer. I was sort of a painter of pictures too and I...
On Highway 54, between Logan and Nara Visa, was the small town of Obar. Now only a cemetery, Obar was the birth place of Frank G. Berlin, who became a millionaire and more. Here is his story: “In Obar, my father had a general merchandise store with everything from calico to coal, bought the homesteaders cream and acted as their banker. He was railroad agent and postmaster (post office was in the corner of the store). He was owner-publisher of the weekly newspaper (Obar Progress) after the death of the (previous) editor. My m...
I was up in Cartersville, Ga., recently, eating with my wife and some of our relatives at an old restaurant in historic section of that town. We were the only ones in that cafe eating. As we started eating I heard the song, “Always Late (With Your Kisses)” and that song played over and over until we finished eating....
I t was hot as all get-out on a July 4th in the late 1950s at a Clovis print shop where I worked. There were five other employees and the boss, plus a bindery “queen.” That’s what we called women who cut up paper and package printed material for customers and did the work in the bindery department. Everyone in the shop that day was all busy. I was busy in the darkroom with the door shut, but not locked because I wasn’t developing film. Like I say it was hot, with no air conditioning that day in the darkroom. I was sweating an...
Most people go by the old Clovis Mill and Elevator Co. on the second block of First Street, east of Main, by the railroad tracks, and never realize the jewel it became. Lester Stone came in 1917 and was the founder of the Clovis Mill and Elevator Co., but it was Joe E. Wilkinson and Cash Ramey, who put this Mill and Elevator Co. together and made it work for the good of the farming and ranching enterprises in Curry County. That mill was the only flour mill in the state of New Mexico at that time. Wilkinson and Ramey and...
The following books are available at the Clovis-Carver Public Library: Cricket in the Web: The 1949 Unsolved Murder that Unraveled Politics in New Mexico by Paula Moore reveals how the discovery of the body of an 18-year-old waitress in a shallow grave near Mesquite launched a series of court trials that would expose political corruption and reshape the direction of New Mexico’s civil rights law. Gathering Roses by Ellen Weisberg explores the pursuit of love and friendship as journalist Lori Solomon dumps a loving, stable b...
It was said that Bailey Foster went berserk early one Sunday morning, seriously wounding two officers who sought to quiet him. Foster lived on his farm which was said to be two miles southeast of Elida. Three hours earlier Foster had attacked Roosevelt County Sheriff R.N. McCall and his deputy, Tom Cardin, with a shotgun, seriously wounding both men. McCall had gone to the home unarmed and at the request of Mrs. Foster, who told the officers her husband had threatened her and her children and had run them off the place. The o...
Our fondness for cowboy heroes is typically American. “We may be the loneliest people on earth, and it’s no accident that the cowboy who rides alone should be the symbol of the American,” said Anthony Padovano, author of a number of books and a faculty member at Fordham University. Padovano calls American a continent “blessed with dreams but also haunted by loneliness.” Yes, it is lonesome, living on a farm, or a ranch out in the country. I spent the first 13 years of my life dreaming of cowboys, driving a tractor as I got...
A woman living alone with her front and back door unlocked in a secluded area is surely in danger in any part of the world today. Clovis is a quiet town usually, but murder is no stranger to Clovis. The murder of Mildred Reagan is a real mystery because her killer has never been arrested and the case never solved as far as I know. Kind of scary, isn’t it? Sometime between 3:30 and 4 p.m. Mildred Reagan, a widow, age 64, was last seen alive. That was on Tuesday before her body was discovered by a couple of Realtors at 10:44 a...
Clarence Worley came to Logan in 1929, bringing a cotton gin from Stillwell, Okla. The Worley family lived in Logan until 1934, when Clarence moved them to Portales to build another cotton gin, one in Dora, and another in Causey. Later his brother, Olan Worley, and his father Arthur Worley, joined him and they formed Worley Brothers Co., and later built a one-man feed-grinding mill, adding a small elevator and putting up a flour mill built of wood construction by the family, as there was no steel available since World War II...
I have known a lot of lawyers in Clovis and mingled with many of them. Here are some of the lawyers that have helped me: A great friend, Wesley Quinn, was a Republican, as was my father. I’d asked Quinn if he could help me with my father’s will after he had died. One of my father’s bankers said he was going to be the administrator of the will, and that’s when Quinn had the power to step in and made me the administrator. His son, Stephen (Steve), practiced law with his father and later Steve became one of the best distric...
“My dad,” said Phil Reiser, formerly of Clovis, now of Albuquerque, “would really have enjoyed passing this story on! “Back in 1956 or ’57 one Sunday afternoon my dad (George W. Reiser Sr.) got a phone call from the Railway Express Agent down at the Santa Fe Railroad depot. “Back in those days the flowers dad sold at Reiser's Florist were shipped in by train, so dad and the agent were friends. The agent told him there were two people at the depot who needed to send flowers to a funeral in California. Not ever missing an oppor...
Back in 1960 I was a bachelor, age 29, and I moved into the the downtown building where Dr. Dean Merrritt had his medical practice. He also had an empty “art room” upstairs, where he used to paint. He rented it out to me, and I had my own art studio, with a bedroom. Well, one morning I woke up with a superb idea. It was an election year and a gang of Democrats was coming to town to solicit votes. The Democrats had their headquarters in Merritt’s building, right under my upstairs bedroom. The newspaper said the Democ...
